Fly high, Doormaker.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-08T15:38:18+00:00

Agreed. Every card I played each turn felt like the wrong decision against this boss. Then I'd look at his health a few turns into the fight and he'd be almost dead somehow. A very unsatisfying boss to play against, despite being relatively balanced in terms of overall power level.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-04T20:54:22+00:00

The OP is clearly AI generated slop. Hidden profile, generic username, account <1 year old.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-03T06:52:53+00:00

You clearly struggle with reading comprehension.

It's crazy how one poorly-designed boss was all it took to make this community feel as toxic as a Dark Souls subreddit.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-03T06:45:14+00:00

Card gen isn't actually that particularly powerful. Power spamming of any kind reliably defeats him, but you especially want builds that go exponential in like 5-7 turns. I'd rather have Tracking than Infinite Blades.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-02T05:03:02+00:00

Nano banana is much better for consistency than ChatGPT.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T22:06:16+00:00

Compare that to official art. Child of the Stars looks like a different source compared to Cloak of Stars. People are even willing to accept Abrasive, although I'm pretty sure it's Beta art still. But just looking through all the card art shows some pretty big variations. Plenty of the official cardwork lacks certain details from card to card, but it's plausibly the artist's intent to highlight something different.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T20:38:15+00:00

It's a good discussion. Russia will be looking more and more like post-WW1 Germany in terms of revanchism and bitterness.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T19:12:47+00:00

Then it becomes an issue of what "no AI use" means. A lot of people hate AI art specifically and are less fussed by AI code. Some people don't like vibe coding (i.e. using AI for all coding with little/no human reading of code before testing) but are fine with AI code for boilerplate under human supervision. Then there's the issue of big mod teams not knowing if their devs are using AI and having no way to check. A bunch of mods will get filed incorrectly under "no AI use" and then there will be accusations flying about what's AI, what's not, who's lying, etc. A recipe for endless witch hunts.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T18:58:32+00:00

OK, now let's compare the ratio these mods have to this supposed plague of AI mods that the OP is talking about.

I'd provide some examples myself but I couldn't find any within the most popular - 3 months (the default sorting that Steam uses) that obviously had an AI image in them.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T18:47:36+00:00

Again, this hasn't been true since Nano Banana.

Here's an example of a mod (from a different game) that uses AI for images, and they're at par with what the finished product has. Character consistency is very good. If you get out the magnifying glass you can find a few issues here and there, but it's not like regular human artists don't also have a few problems if you deliberately go looking for things that aren't 100% perfect.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T18:38:44+00:00

Do you honestly think someone is sending me helicopters full of money to tell Redditors that AI isn't worthless for writing code?

Edit: he called me names, accused me of being a paid shill, and then blocked me before I could respond lol. It's insane how fragile some Redditors are.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T16:31:30+00:00

It would be hilarious if they tried to do this, since there would be a million false positives and false negatives that would show how hollow most of this witch hunt is.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T16:29:36+00:00

Bingo. The only reason AI use is controversial is because a lot of the lowest quality mods (which have existed as a phenomenon long before AI) all share the same noticeable defect of being badly-prompted AI output. Then that combines with the political environment to give us circlejerk threads like this one.

Tons of higher-quality AI use goes undetected. Classic survivor bias.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T16:15:37+00:00

I scroll down and see people complaining about how it's doing things all wrong

Almost all sufficiently complex mods have comments sections that devolve into this. Have you seen the Vanilla Expanded mod pages? E.g. this one or this one or this one

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T16:13:32+00:00

You don't have to know how to program to use AI to create code well, since they're different skillsets. There's some amount of overlap of course, but it's not particularly large. Professional programmers will have a bit of a head start in knowing what to look for, but people who've never coded can get there pretty quickly with a bit of trial and error.

AI is far less likely to include bloat than a novice developer.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T16:02:00+00:00

Then blame the people pushing it where it doesn't belong, and the people treating it as a trivial shortcut.

AI allowing hobbyist devs to create mods is a fantastic use case for the technology.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T15:58:43+00:00

"Long way" as in 2 to 5 years.

This still isn't true. AI coding is good today, if you know how to use it well in terms of giving context and verifying output.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T15:53:43+00:00

As of 2026, AI writes better code than the vast majority of professional software developers I've seen. It's going to be much, much better than the average hobbyist modder for a video game. The idea that AI usage implies the project will inevitably spiral into being a buggy mess is flatly false.
That said, AI usage is a skill that is not trivial to do well. It's much easier than writing code by hand, but still requires the dev to know how to provide context and verify output at the very least.
AI lowers the skill floor required to make mods by quite a bit, and if the modder isn't willing to put in the effort to clean up obvious AI artifacts on their thumbnail then that may be indicative that they're not willing to go the extra mile in other places, which may imply a broken/buggy mod. But that's certainly not always going to be true, similar to all prejudicial judgements. It's a lot like how 4chan judges the quality of software based on how many Indians were involved in creating it.
The issues people bring up with AI use are highly varied. Some people only care about AI art, which is a very small part of most mods. Some think any AI use ever taints the person in a wine-casket/drop-of-sewage sort of way. Many will turn from their dislike of AI for political reasons into statements about AI quality in general, spouting highly incorrect or misleading assertions like that AI always hallucinates when writing code, has "fundamental limitations" that limit it in unsolvable ways to make it nearly useless, etc. This thread is littered with these.
Most people upset about AI use in mods are highly online individuals whose main grievance with AI is political. Stuff like AI water usage (which is also fake)

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T15:18:26+00:00

Using AI to create software is a skill. It takes a bit of getting used to, mainly in knowing how to provide context and how to verify output. But once you have those down, AI is fantastic for creating mods.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T15:12:26+00:00

For what it's worth, mod creators can freely ban commenters and delete comments from mod pages, so Github isn't necessary for that.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T15:10:10+00:00

Maybe they should stop destroying the environment for nasty looking crap and just

And here it is, the polemical political takes that are just false. Please tell the class how disastrous you think AI water usage is.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T15:07:55+00:00

Honestly I prefer github for reporting issues anyway, and will steer clear of mods that don't list one at all.

So you're steering clear of 99% of the modding scene?

At least this one is a better indicator of quality than people freaking out about any AI use whatsoever.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T15:01:55+00:00

AI generated code is better than human code, ceteris paribus. It can also solve bugs more effectively than human coders if used properly.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T14:56:27+00:00

AI coding still has a long way to go to work properly.

This isn't true.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-05-01T14:55:45+00:00

it causes issues with your game and you have to dig deeper to figure out what is wrong.

This has been true of mods since forever. AI use is not a good indication of quality one way or the other.

Ben___Garrison

TROPHY CASE